Interviews

On the 10th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto, Ward Cunningham discusses software craftsmanship, pair programming, and the changes in Agile over the last ten years. He explains how his original ideas have become diluted, and shares his latest project, based on ideas originating from his work with HyperCard, to create federated documents.

Two of ThoughtWorks’ finest, Martin Fowler and Jez Humble, talk about the notion of Continuous Delivery, which enables organizations to build software that is production ready at all times. To do this, enterprises automate the build, deployment, and testing process, and improve collaboration between developers, testers, and operations. The duo discusses a variety of related issues.

Laurie Williams, who heads the Software Engineering Research group at North Carolina State University, discusses her research into Agile principles and practices. Williams also talks about Comparative Agility, which is a tool to show teams where they stand in terms of the adoption of Agile practices. Comparative Agility was launched in 2007 and since that time over 400 people have used it.

In this interview Jez Humble discusses the concept of continuous delivery, which implies that software should always be production ready throughout its lifecycle. That means that every build could be released into production and run effectively. Continuous delivery involves build and deployment automation, continuous integration, test automation, managing infrastructure and environments and more.

In this interview, Gil Broza, an Agile coach and founder of 3P Vantage, talks about what it takes to coach development teams to adopt Agile practices. Broza also discusses the role of the Agile coach. Broza said, “How do you prepare yourself to be a coach? - You have to have been a player. In my case I was a developer for many years, I was a manager as well and I worked closely with the business…”

In this interview Elisabeth Hendrickson talks about the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools (AA-FTT) group, a discussion group related to advances in functional testing tools for Agile projects. She says this Yahoo group focuses on automated functional testing as an integral and essential part of Agile development. She also discusses the maturity of the state of functional testing tools.

In this interview, Cyndi Mitchell talks about ThoughtWorks’ concept of “Continuous Delivery,” which focuses on the last mile of software delivery. Mitchell also discusses the “adaptive” in ThoughtWorks Studios’ Adaptive ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) strategy, in which Agile solutions must be adaptive to users’ needs. And Mitchell describes ThoughtWorks Studios tools: Mingle, Go and Twist.

Ashley Johnson shares his views on Agile development, in particular the move toward “Personal Agility.” Johnson says it is not possible to have an Agile organization of any scale without having the individuals behave in an Agile manner. Part of Personal Agility is about taking responsibility and approaching others as humans rather than obstacles. Johnson also discussed the Scrum vs. Kanban debate.

In this interview, Joshua Kerievsky, founder of Industrial Logic, discusses the need for developer
performance metrics to enable organizations to determine the capabilities of developers. He also discusses his
project known as the Limited Red Society. The goal of the Limited Red Society is to help developers limit the
amount of time their code is in the red.

Henrik Kniberg discusses the differences among different Agile processes such as Scrum, XP, and Kanban. He shares the thought that processes wars are meaningless and we need to see each process as a tool; there are no bad tools; just tools used for the wrong purpose.

In this interview at Agile 2009, Joshua Kerievsky describes how his team was able to transform their software development project once they found and used an appropriate system metaphor. Joshua also shares how his development team has let go of many traditional practices and continues to refine their skills such that they are delivering more value regularly.